When people go to war, the whole country starts to work hard (if the people want to win). For example, in World War II, women went to work in the factories, many of the men went to war, and even the kids got in on the act, collecting things to recycle and use as war materials. People are also willing to sacrifice luxuries and save their money during times of war.

If the wartime economy booms when we are at war because people work hard, wouldn’t economies of the world boom if more people worked harder? I have heard so many people complain over the years about how so many people don’t know how to work hard. Of course, there’s the whole issue of “how do you work hard if you don’t have a job to begin with” that many unemployed people are facing these days. I’ve written articles before about jobs that people can create for themselves. It does take creativity to think up your own job, but it is possible.

I have more work available to me than I could possibly do, running my business.

Wealth is not a fixed pie, where if one person has part of it, somebody else goes without. Wealth is created when people create things. Whether they are producing food, art, content, electronic gadgets, or inventing new and better ways to do things, the more people do, the more wealth we all have. It is true that there is some amount of competition, but we all know that monopolies don’t produce the best results (think DMV).

Do something productive today. Or tomorrow (because today is Sunday, a day of rest for many).

A couple of days ago, I made a post asking “are you a producer or a consumer?” These days, there are some people who would like to be doing something but just can’t seem to find a job. I do know how hard that can be; I had a difficult time getting a job out of high school (so I joined the military). If things are bad on the job front, you don’t need to sit around and wait for things to get better. While you are looking for a more permanent job, you can be working, earning a little money, and gaining experience right now! You may decide that you don’t want to return to the regular workforce, or you might use your experience to get another job. Here are some ideas that you might want to try.

I started working from home as a way to earn money while still homeschooling my kids. I’ve tried many of these ideas. Some of them worked for me, others were miserable failures. Since your skills are different than mine, you may succeed in areas that I had trouble in.

Ebay: My aunt makes pretty good money selling things on eBay, although I never had much luck myself. The good thing is, nobody has to hire you for you to make money on eBay. You just have to have an eye for a bargain and know how much something is worth. My aunt goes to the Goodwill Outlet store to get most of the things she sells on eBay, but other people find things other places.

Home Party Sales: This is another area that I have tried (and failed) at, but I know a few people that actually do well with this kind of business. You can find a home party business in almost any category that you’re passionate about, from candles to scrapbooking supplies to cookware. If you’re not very outgoing or can’t sell ice cubes to a thirsty guy in the desert, this may not be your cup of tea (that is why I don’t succeed here). Almost every one of these businesses require a small investment; if you are good at sales though, it might be worth a try.

Content Production: This was the opportunity that I was looking for. I can write, at least well enough that some people want to read my stuff. I got my start writing for Associated Content, but I also write for places like Squidoo, List My 5, and Hubpages. If you like to write, this kind of work can provide you with a steady stream of income, and can give you experience that might get you hired by someone else (that did happen to me, although I no longer work for that company). The pay can be low, especially at first.

Designing Stuff: If you are an artist, then you might want to open up an Etsy shop and sell your original pieces. You might also want to consider opening up an account at Zazzle. I know a very talented artist; I suggested that he open up a Zazzle account. He hasn’t done much with it, and doesn’t make much money. I am not a talented artist, but I know how to do some things, and I do make some money at Zazzle. There are other companies that you can design for, but I don’t know much about them, so I can’t recommend them.

Amazon mTurk: My main way of earning money is by producing content and designing for Zazzle, but when you earn money there, you are dependent upon people reading your stuff, buying from you, and clicking on your links. After a while, the income is fairly predictable, but it takes a while to really grow your business. If you’re looking for a bit of extra income but can’t wait to grow your business, you can sign up for an Amazon mTurk account. At mTurk, there are thousands of small little jobs to do, like rewriting sentences, categorizing products, or answering surveys. Most don’t pay much, but they don’t take a long time to do either.

I recently wanted to earn enough money to get a Roku box to watch Glenn Beck Television on, but the money I earn from designing generally pays for my daughter’s gymnastics. To earn extra money, I worked for Amazon mTurk. Between the mTurk assignments and the Swagbucks Amazon gift cards I earned while conducting web searches to complete these assignments, it took me about three weeks, in my spare time and while watching GBTV, to earn enough for a Roku box (I bought the more expensive version). I plan to continue to do some of these assignments in order to afford some other things that I would like. It’s not great money, but I work when I want, and for how long I want.

Host a Radio Show: I haven’t done this one, although I’m thinking about maybe doing an occasional radio program. You may have listened to podcasts from BlogTalkRadio. Anybody can host a program, and the only equipment you need is a computer and a phone. There is a way to earn a share of the advertising revenue from your listeners, along with the opportunity to get your name known in order to help support any other business ventures that you have. If this is all that you are doing, I don’t think that it would earn a great deal of money at first, but it can be a great way for you to get your name out and get people to visit your other web sites.

Those are some ways that you can earn a little spare cash, even if nobody out there is willing to hire you. Of course, you’re not limited to just this kind of work. If you’re creative, then you can probably think of something else. There’s no reason to cry and say that there’s no work out there. It may not pay what you would like, but if you’re between jobs, what else do you have to do? Working independently does give you experience that you can put on your resume and perhaps land you a job at another company, if that’s what you are looking for.

I’ve been reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged over the last few days and it’s been hard to put down. I don’t know why, but it seems like I often read the right books at the right time. Rand is almost prophetic in some of the things that she says. Right now, her book seems to fit in nicely with the whole Occupy Wall Street crowd.

In Atlas Shrugged, there are two kinds of people: the looters and the producers. I’d have to guess that most of the people occupying Wall Street, Los Angeles, Seattle, and wherever they’re occupying, are looters. They think that they have the right to other people’s work. They’re unhappy not because the government is taking too much from them, but because they aren’t receiving enough from the government.

There are some services that it makes sense that the government provides. Roads. Courts. The military. We all benefit from them; we all need them. Should the government provide schools? I know that they started out with good intentions in mind, and perhaps it makes sense that local communities get together and provide local schools (or at least provide financial assistance for those families that can’t afford private schools), but this doesn’t have to be done on a national scale. Do we really need the FDA telling us that aspartame and vaccines are good but raw milk is going to make us sick? Couldn’t we create a private organization, like Consumer Reports, to do that sort of work?

I was struck by one chapter in the book where one of the main producers, Dagny Taggart, quits her job and goes to live in a cabin in the country. She quit because the government passed a set of laws that basically took away all of her freedom of choice about whether to work or not (just wait, I can see situations where that could be coming to the United States).

In isolation, her character remained the same. She saw problems at her little house and decided to fix them, repairing shingles, creating a walkway, and planting flowers. The nearby town didn’t receive a grocery store shipment because it had rained, and every time it rains the road becomes impassable. She asked, if the road always washed out when it rained, why didn’t they just fix it? Not being one to just sit and complain, she started thinking about fixing the road herself, after she fixed up her little cabin a bit.

While Dagny might have been a railroad heiress, her success didn’t come because her family was rich. Even without all of her monetary possessions around her, she was still getting things done and making improvements to her surroundings.

So what are you? Are you a looter or a producer at heart? You can’t tell by how much money you have now. When you face a problem, do you whine because it’s hopeless, or do you do your best to fix it? Do you want to rely on yourself for the things you need, trading your hard work with others fairly, or do you want others to provide things for you? I realize that sometimes people need a little help, especially in this economy, but when you receive help, is it your goal to get to the point where you can make it on your own and perhaps pay it forward, or are you happy right where you are at?

After I left the military several years ago and time had passed for a few years, things were looking pretty dim for me, in my eyes. My husband’s job wasn’t paying that much, and it didn’t look like there was ever hope to get paid anything above mediocrity. We were having trouble paying bills. We had a string of job losses and our house caught on fire. It was a very difficult time in my life.

Things started to look up. Dh started going to college (he’s now in law school). I started my own business. Dh helped start a business. Good things have started happening to us. Dh was accepted into the Alliance Defense Fund’s Blackstone Fellowship, and today he received an email from somebody asking if he would like to apply for a student assistant position at a law office. I don’t know if he will get the job or not, but the fact that someone is seeking him out asking if he wants to apply for a job is pretty good.

In the past few years, I’ve seen so many ways where people can create incomes, even if they can’t find a job. Maybe they’re not high paying, but they help out, and you can put them on your resume if you still want to work for someone else (I put my Epinions experience on my resume when looking for a writing job; I did get the job). Often, you don’t even need money to start out. Perhaps, if you’re crying for someone else to come save you financially, you might want to think and try to figure out ways that you can start producing.

In the last week, the AP published a series of sob stories about poor people who were having trouble making it in today’s economy. It received a lot of criticism from Blaze readers (I personally like the Blaze, although not all the commentators).

Stop painting the poor with some broad brush. The “poverty” level is just a number. Do people realize that two different families with the same income can live completely different lifestyles?

It is true that there are people that spend years on welfare and never do anything about it. It’s also true that for some, “poverty” is just a bump in the road between years of prosperity. In my family’s case, we used to make the equivalent of six figures… and I expect, between my business, the business that my husband helped found, and the law degree that my husband is in the process of getting, that we will not be among the “impoverished” several years from now.

What makes Stuart Varney think that I am “poor in spirit” because I don’t earn much money? I go to church… in fact, I give to the church when I can, even though that means that I might have to put in a little extra hours working. I spend a lot of time with my kids – that usually happens when you homeschool. I read books by Gibbon and Geoffrey of Monmouth, and can converse with you on topics like the Little Ice Age and how to protect your emergency equipment from an EMP blast. I didn’t vote for Obama and I support the Tea Party. I don’t support the RINOs that seem to be the media darlings for the Republican presidential nomination either. I support small government, and support massive cuts in entitlements. I don’t use the entitlement that most people take to send their kids to a public school. So from where am I lacking this “richness of spirit” that Mr. Varney seems to think comes with a massive income?

People with the same incomes can live completely different lifestyles. We’re not in debt. We couldn’t afford credit cards even if we wanted them, because we couldn’t afford the payments. We own our two cars outright – one of my cars is 24 years old (I didn’t even have a driver’s license back then). The other car we once had a payment on, but I’m glad to get rid of that, because it was hard to afford. If there’s any way possible, I’d like to pay cash for our next car. I’ll have to save up for that one.

We cut back in many areas that most people spend a lot of money on. My cell phone is for emergencies only and is prepaid, so it’s pretty cheap. Cable and internet are free with our apartment, which is relatively inexpensive since it’s student housing. Those savings, combined with not having car or credit card payments, allow us to live fairly comfortably, even though we live below the “poverty line”. When we first lost the majority of our income, it was hard, but we’ve learned to live with it. I’d like more wiggle room, but we’re okay. We’ll be wealthier someday, more than likely. My main complaint is with people who think that “poor” people are Obama-supporting, high-school dropout, idiotic welfare cheats that don’t have jobs, just because their income happens to be under a certain level. That’s just not the case all of the time.

In some ways, I’m better off than when I was raking in the dough. Back then, we didn’t pay much attention to our spending because the money was always coming. I would spend a $20 like it was nothing. We constantly overdrafted our bank account as a result. That doesn’t happen now. I pay attention to my money. When dd accidentally dropped her tennis shoes in the water, I told her that I couldn’t replace them, and that she needed to pray for shoes. Well, we did, and God provided about 10 pairs of shoes within a week.

So please save your judgements for people based on their income levels. While I do know people who are having financial troubles because they made stupid mistakes, we are not in financial trouble. I know of other people who make less than me that are also not in financial trouble. Money is not a measure of how smart or kind someone is.

Hillary Clinton rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange today. The Dow Jones fell several hundred points. Is she bad luck? Gold and silver didn’t go up either.

Mexico, Southern California and part of Arizona had their power knocked out last night. Does that have anything to do with the solar flares that I wrote about the other day?

Speaking of power, my power is out. My dh has a phone with mobile wi-fi broadcast capability. I normally hate the amount of money he spends on that thing, but right now it is coming in handy. Until my laptop runs out of juice. Then I guess there’s not much to do except read. This power outage doesn’t have anything to do with solar flares though. I’m sure it was knocked out in the lightning storm.

There are armed security forces in New York City running around with machine guns because of the suspected terrorist threat. I’ve never seen military threats like those in the United States. I’ve seen them in Mexico, in Ecuador, in Colombia, and in Italy, but never in the United States. I guess that the times are changing.

Things are interesting. Hopefully the power will come back sometime tonight so I’ll be able to be productive tomorrow (because this battery will not last).

I’ve written before about how much I love Amazon.com’s Prime program. My husband was able to get it because he’s in law school, and they offer free shipping to students. I order from Amazon all the time as a result. I love knowing that whatever I order from them will come in two days, for free (the shipping part at least).

Anyway, Zazzle has it’s new Black program. You can get a year of free standard shipping for $10, or a year of free 2 day shipping (similar to Amazon’s Prime program) for $39.95. They offer a free trial too.

Shipping can always be a big cost when you order something, so I love this new program. You can get some great Zazzle products (like this wolf poster by DRCrafts), buttons, stickers, etc. I know that it seems far away now, but the end of the year will come up sooner than you know it, and custom calendars are very cool gift ideas. I did one for my family with my kids pictures in it quite a while ago.

If you’re somebody that already designs for Zazzle, then I’m sure that you already knew about the Zazzle Black program, but if you’re not a Zazzle designer, then you might not have known. I personally will be more likely to order from Zazzle if I know that I can get the reduced shipping costs. The “World’s Greatest Grandma” shopping bag that I ordered for my mom’s Christmas present seemed to be of really excellent quality, and sometimes I think about ordering things but the shipping always keeps me from ordering something small.

I was planning on writing about earthquakes, but I’ve been writing way too many apocalyptic posts so far in this challenge, so I thought I’d change things a bit. Today I’ll write about Earning money from home.

I started working from home in December of 2008. Earlier that year, our house had caught on fire and we had to move. My husband was barely making enough money to make ends meet. I was homeschooling, and that was my top priority. The only jobs that I could think of in the evenings were working at McDonald’s, and most of those places think I’m overqualified (and I don’t believe in lying on the part where it says education).

I was listening to Dave Ramsey, and he was talking about how if you want to be rich, you do what rich people do, and if you want to be poor, you do what poor people do. We weren’t wasting our money, but to use his terminology, our shovel was just too small. You just can’t have stress-free finances when you’re making less than half the poverty level, which we were at the time.

I already knew what didn’t work for me. I can’t sell an Ethiopian ice cubes on a hot summer day. I’m too shy, and I have trouble talking to people. So that was out the window. I tried Half.com, and ended up spending more on shipping supplies (and spent hours walking back and forth to the post office with my daughter in a stroller) than I made. I couldn’t figure out what to sell on eBay. I did a search, and discovered that people could make money writing. I could do that!

So here I am, writing. I’ve been writing for Associated Content, Squidoo, List My 5, Hub Pages, and blogs. A couple of other places too. I’ve designed products for Zazzle. It’s been a lot of fun.

I’m very fortunate to have found this means of earning money while still spending time with my kids.

That leads me to my point: invest in what you know. I don’t know enough about the stock market at this point to be able to invest with confidence. I know that, in ordinary times, that buy and hold usually works. It even worked for people that bought right before the stock market crash before the Great Depression – if you held onto the stocks for decades.

I don’t think that we’re in ordinary times. I think that we’re in Biblical times. I expect to see a change that is more extraordinary than what anyone in the western world has seen in their lifetimes. I was reading in The Story of the World Volume 3 this morning how the weaver’s lives were changed when factories were introduced. I think that we’re in for the same kind of change.

While I don’t know much about stocks right now, I do know that if the dollar collapses, there’s going to be mass chaos. That’s why I’ve been preparing for the dollar’s collapse. I don’t like the idea of having too much tied up in dollars (or things dependent on dollars) nowadays. A work-from-home writer and a law student don’t bring in a very large income to begin with, but if I did have much money, I wouldn’t have much tied up in dollars. I do pay attention to what is going on with the National Debt, and with countries trying to get the dollar knocked off its pedestal as the world’s reserve currency.

You don’t necessarily need money to get ready for the dollar’s collapse. Learning some skills that our ancestors knew to save money and produce wealth is just as good. I might not be able to afford a stockpile of gold, but if your clothes are falling apart and you don’t know how to fix them, I can potentially barter my sewing skills for some food.

While I don’t know much about today’s stock market, I do pay attention to the country’s finances. That’s why I’m investing the little that I have in what I know. If anything, at least I won’t be shocked when I wake up one day and the news announces that our dollar is worthless.

I like ordering things online, but I hate paying for shipping. I especially like ordering things from Amazon.com with all the free gift cards that I’m getting from Swagbucks. Just a reminder: if you’re a college student, sign up for free Amazon Prime membership for free 2-day shipping. I love the free Amazon Prime membership that I have through my husband’s student status!

If you’ve been thinking about ordering something from Zazzle.com, but you hate paying for shipping, from now until the end of the day they’re giving away free shipping with no minimum! Just use the code JINGLESALE61. Not only do they have billions of designs from regular people (some with better art skills than me), they also have designs from Disney, Star Wars, musical groups, and more. Since the shipping is free today with no minimum, if you’ve been looking at a button or a bumper sticker that you really like, today is the day to get it.

A lady walked into a CVS pharmacy without the money to pay for the inhaler that they were trying to buy. She had an inhaler, but she left it at home.

The reaction that many people have had to this story is that the pharmacist should have done something. Many think that he should have lost his job because he didn’t give them the product.

When I worked at McDonald’s, if my till would have come up short at the end of the day, I could have lost my job. I’m guessing that many retail outlets have the same policy. Do people want to force the pharmacist to give these people his money? Do they want the pharmacist to lose his job?

Some people might think to themselves “well, it was less than $2.” That’s a lot of money to some people. We don’t know anything about the pharmacist’s financial situation. Perhaps the pharmacist didn’t have any money to give to these people. It’s not the pharmacist’s responsibility to give money to customers that come into the store, even if they are needy.

I do have to ask myself some other questions. What about the other people in the store? Couldn’t someone in the store have been charitable enough to give someone in need some money? I know that if I was in the store and $2 stood in the way of my being able to get my husband some needed medication, I probably would have asked someone if they could spare money (since it was an emergency and everything). A few people with a quarter each would have covered it. In the story, their friend who is a paramedic came with an inhaler for them. Their friend didn’t have the $2 that they needed? Neither Catherine O’Connor or her boyfriend had a debit card? They were able to afford McDonalds’; did they have change when they ate there, or did they spend every last dollar in their bank account there?

Charity is a good thing, and it would have been nice if there would have been somebody in the CVS store that had it. On the other hand, personal responsibility is important too. If you’re having asthma attacks, don’t leave your inhaler at home, and don’t spend the money that you should be spending on medicine at McDonald’s (there are cheaper places to eat).